Flying! Soaring through the air, as free as a bird. It was a lifelong dream of Jia’s—maybe a little bit childlike, but after discovering that it could actually be done with cultivation, who could blame her? Eui didn’t really share Jia’s obsession with learning to fly—which was ironic, since she was the one who had started learning the technique. Started, that is—she still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it. Not the most comforting thought when she was staring down at the forest below her.

“This is much higher up than I meant to go.”

The first problem—Eui had very poor control over the technique. It was all or nothing, she either flew at maximum speed, or not at all.

“Oh shit, that took a lot out of me too.”

The second problem—as she had been warned, it was prohibitively expensive. A single leap had nearly entirely drained what little resources she had left at her disposal. Luckily, her momentary flight had taken her above the canopy and the smoke was no longer interfering with her breathing, allowing her to quickly recoup some of her lost mana—though not nearly enough to sustain flight.

Well, sustaining flight wasn’t really the point. Eui knew she couldn’t do that. She was mostly just hoping she’d survive the landing at this point. Would it be more efficient to use Ascension to slow her fall, or just heal whatever broke when she landed? After a moment of thought, Eui grimly realized that it was definitely the latter.

She prepared herself to land, preemptively channeling qi from Tranquility through herself even as she infused her body with destructive energy.

“This is going to fucking suck.”

Eui carefully adjusted her course as she plummeted back to the ground. If it was going to suck for her, she could at least take solace in the fact that someone else was going to get it much much worse. She struck the ground like a meteor, leaving a ten foot wide crater, at the bottom of which was the broken body of the disciple that Xin had spoken to.

“Shen Yongrui has been eliminated.”

One down, two to go. Unfortunately, Eui hadn’t escaped from her little stunt unscathed—the impact had hit Eui nearly as hard as Shen, but she’d been prepared for it. Still, her legs were a mess, and if not for the healing she’d prepared, she’d have been knocked out as well. She might still be at this rate, but she intended to go down fighting.

Before her enemies could recover from the confusion, Eui activated a mana shield talisman and then slapped a second talisman on the ground next to her. The wall spell wasn’t as impressive as Jia's since Eui just didn’t have the same talent for magic, but she made up for it with unorthodox applications.

In this case, the wall was more like a pillar, and as it shot out of the ground under her, it flung Eui bodily toward the nearest opponent—she’d spend a lot of time trying to make up for her lack of mobility, and this was the solution she had found. As an added bonus, it worked even with her legs out of commission.

The startled disciples flung a variety of attacks her way, but she shifted the element of her mana shield to mud, cancelling out the worst of the air and fire attacks—the rest she could just heal. She landed directly on top of her unfortunate target, wrapping her arms around him as they both crashed to the ground. Once they landed, she jabbed him in the side with her tail. Clad in the destructive power of her ki, her tail was like a spear, and after three vicious strikes, she heard the announcement.

“Yu Dong has been eliminated.”

She sent a pulse of Tranquility through him to stop the bleeding. One left. It didn’t matter which, they just needed to eliminate one more person. Eui looked around and realized that it was probably going to be her. The rest of her team had started scrambling as soon as she landed, but they were too slow. They weren’t going to make it in time, and Eui was out of tricks, out of mana, and just generally kind of exhausted. She was ready to be done with this. She couldn’t even really go down fighting, since the spiritual artists would just blast her from a distance—but she refused to yield. She closed her eyes and prepared for the worst.

“STOP! Fujikawa Ayumi has surrendered. The remaining sixteen will advance to the single combat event. Congratulations!”

Eui opened her eyes in surprise. Fujikawa hadn’t been in any danger, so why? A sudden downpour of water appeared over the burning section of forest as Yuuko and Fujikawa approached. Kim Yongsun eyed the Qin disciples warily as they collected their injured. To Eui’s surprise, Fujikawa fell to her knees next to Eui and swept her up in a tight hug.

“Thank the Kami you’re okay! I didn’t know what to think when you suddenly flew like that!”

“Ow, ow, ow! Fujikawa put me down, my fucking bones are broken.”

Fujikawa gasped and dropped Eui in a panic, which caused more problems than it solved. Yuuko turned away, covering her mouth as she tried not to laugh. Eui groaned and leveled a glare at Fujikawa.

“Not helping. Why don’t you help heal me while I recover some mana?”

Fujikawa blushed bright red and nodded, placing her hands on Eui and circulating the cool, refreshing essence of purity through her. She was kinda cute when she was flustered—if Eui didn’t already have Jia...

After a few minutes of meditation, Eui could concentrate on her own healing again. The smaller fractures and superficial injuries were easy to spot-treat, but her legs were going to need some special attention. When she was satisfied that her condition was as good as it was going to get for now, she opened her eyes again and looked at Fujikawa.

“Why did you surrender? I knew what I was getting into when I dove in like that—I didn’t need you to save me.”

Fujikawa smiled wryly and shrugged.

“I don’t think that single-combat is my thing. I work best in a team, and it didn’t seem very practical for me to take your place in the tournament. Besides, you showed me my potential as a strategist—you can consider this a thank you for that. I look forward to meeting you in the team divisions once I’ve given Fujino and Minami the proposals I’ve been holding back.”

Eui chuckled sardonically.

“Oh, great. I’ve created a monster. Really though, you don’t need to thank me. I just picked you because you seemed smart and I wanted the idiot squad to shut the fuck up.”

Kim shot her a nasty look while Yuuko just snorted goodnaturedly.

“Alright, now somebody needs to carry me home so I can put my stupid legs back together.”

Yue sat in the middle of a forest clearing—the same one that used to house the cabin that she had once used as a hideout when she was still part of Zheng Long’s group. It was gone now, presumably removed soon after it had been discovered, or perhaps simply as preparation for the tournament. She was meditating—gathering spiritual energy while sparing a portion of her attention to any changes in her domain.

Unlike Eui’s qualifier, this one had been going quite smoothly. Yue didn’t blame her, of course. That team had been horribly unbalanced, with too many supports and not enough raw power. They were almost entirely reliant on Eui’s offense, and her abilities were exorbitantly expensive for an early third-stage cultivator. Yue shuddered to imagine how frightening that girl would be once she reached the peak of houtian.

Conversely, her own group had a solid front line in Guan Yi, Fujino Eiji, and Harada Jun, supported by herself and some raccoon-eared boy whose name she’d never bothered to learn. Then there was Hyeong Daesung. Not only had he been the easy and obvious choice to lead their group, but he was also the reason that none of them had to concern themselves with the chance of elimination.

He had already been rather absurd before his breakthrough, but now he was like a force of nature. While his talismans lasted at any rate—and he had quite a few of them, but as his future teammate, Yue would rather not force him to expend his resources so early in the tournament. It would take far too long to recover them.

So they were instead fighting as much as they could without him. It hadn’t been hard—they were being avoided by most of the others. In fact, Yue guessed that the only reason they’d seen any action at all was because of another superlative force terrorizing this round.

“Wei Zedong has been eliminated.”

The announcement had been preceded by a distant crash. Another victim of Hayakawa Kaede’s rampage. As far as they could gather, Hayakawa had been acting alone, but nobody could touch her. Most of the encounters they’d had since the round began had been from people who were forced to either run into them or Hayakawa. It said a lot that most chose to face their group of six.

They hadn’t encountered Hayakawa themselves, and Yue suspected that it was a result of her own influence. That wasn’t just ego talking—Hayakawa had every reason to be wary of Yue’s mental attacks. Without being certain of how effective the Melody of the Dreaming Moon would be against her, it was wisest not to risk engaging with it.

That left Yue with the incredibly boring task of waiting for Hayakawa to finish mopping up the remaining opponents one at a time while they picked off fleeing stragglers. It didn’t help her mood that she had to suffer Guan Yi shooting her sour looks the entire time. Of course, his expression didn’t really change—he was as stoic as ever—but she could understand the meaning of his looks just the same.

She deserved it. Guan Yi had given her the benefit of the doubt, even tried to help console her over the death of her brother and mend the bridge between her and her roommates. He was as sweet and gentle as any man she’d ever met—for all that he had that stiff rigidity of someone who’d been raised to be a soldier and bodyguard. She’d taken advantage of him—probably broken his heart, not that he’d ever show or admit it—and she hated herself for it.

Yue didn’t know how to talk to Guan Yi. It had been hard enough making up with Jia and Eui, and though her betrayal of Guan Yi paled in comparison to what she had done to them—it felt different. He had obviously liked her, and with the benefit of hindsight Yue could realize that she felt the same. That made things so much more complicated, and she wasn’t sure that was a rift that could ever be repaired. Then again, she had thought the same of Jia and Eui.

She was broken from her thoughts by a presence within her domain, running towards them at full speed. She stood up and faced the direction that it was coming from.

“Someone is approaching at speed, they’re alone, but fast.”

Dae nodded, summoning a swirling helix of floating talismans from that glowing scroll of his.

“Prepare for the worst—that’s the direction Hayakawa was last seen in!”

Yue focused more closely on the enemy—she was still getting used to sensing things this way, and it wasn’t always as easy to tell what she was sensing as Jia, Eui, or even Eunae made it look.

“It’s not her—but that doesn’t mean she isn’t following close behind.”

That got her a round of acknowledgements as Guan, Fujino, and Harada prepared to intercept the enemy. Yue hummed a quiet song, infusing her voice and her domain with the power of her Melody. Moments later, their target came into view—a Yamato boy moving extremely fast. It had to be some kind of mobility-focused martial art like Jia’s.

He saw their group waiting for him and leapt up, bounding off of a tree in order to pass over the heads of their front line. Guan Yi slashed the air, while Fujino and Harada used their own spell talismans in order to catch their foe, but he twisted unnaturally to avoid the invisible attacks in midair before landing behind them and launching himself straight towards Yue.

Yue had been getting better with her martial arts, but like Eunae, it was mostly in support of her other abilities. She couldn’t compare to a dedicated martial artist in close combat. As the enemy approached, she saw Dae prepare one of his talismans, but she held up a hand to stop him—she would be fine.

The student lunged forward to strike her, but as her song reached a crescendo, Yue stepped aside and the boy went tumbling to the ground. Yue was already developing a few beads of sweat as she maintained her concentration—this was much harder to do in the second stage. Normally it should have been impossible, but her new cultivation method had its perks. The boy’s eyes glazed over as he stared up at the sky.

“I surrender.”

“STOP! Kuba Masayoshi has surrendered. The remaining sixteen will advance to the single combat event. Congratulations!”

Clarity returned to the boy's eyes as he sat up, casting about in a panic.

“Wait, no! I didn’t mean—that’s not fair! You can’t do that!”

Yue tried to suppress a giggle as the boy fruitlessly tried to protest his loss. It really was unfair, but it was a loophole in the rules that she was more than happy to exploit. It was a boring conclusion, but not an unexpected one. In the end, they never met any real opposition—there was enough room for them to avoid Hayakawa and vice-versa.

Eunae frowned up at the boy tied to a tree by some kind of thin, silken string. The string cut into his flesh in several places, and there was already a small pool of blood at the base of the tree. This was the fourth person they’d found like this.

“Ishihara, do you want to try again?”

Eunae wasn’t comfortable ordering people around, but she’d been unanimously selected as the leader of their group. She didn’t understand why at all—she was useless as a leader and barely passable as a mage. If not for her ancestral technique, she’d be completely worthless. Heedless of Eunae’s self-doubts, Ishihara Nao nodded and approached the strung-up disciple. He was a half spirit, which was new—the others had all been from Yamato.

Ishihara pressed a finger to the boy’s forehead and closed his eyes in concentration for a few minutes while the others watched their perimeter cautiously. When he was finished he shook his head.

“Same as the others. He got tangled in some invisible strings, then paralyzed when one of them cut into his skin. He was stuck for a few minutes before the memory just stops—presumably knocked out.”

That was concerning. Ishihara’s ability to read the recent memories of people through their dreams was useful, but hadn’t managed to uncover any information about this unknown trapper that had been targeting non-imperial students. All of their victims had fallen without ever seeing their opponent.

They discovered another two victims before the qualifier ended without more than a few minor skirmishes. Eunae was relieved to have made it through without any losses from her group, but the fact that they’d never found the trapper made her uneasy. Just who was this person, and why was nobody aware of them or their abilities?

Jia swallowed nervously. It had been a harrowing few days, watching her friends fighting in the qualifiers. She thought she was going to have a heart attack when Eui pulled that stunt with the flying, and Hayakawa’s one-woman rampage through her own qualifiers had been extremely worrying. The strangest had definitely been Eunae’s group—Jia had tried to find the person that kept stringing people up, but even with the scrying artifact that Do Hye had given her she hadn’t been able to figure out who it was.

Now, it was her turn. She felt more out of depth than she had even on her first day at the academy. No friends or allies, no Eui, no Yoshika, just her alone against who knows how many enemies. In the worst case, forty nine of them. She had already confirmed that Sun Jaehwa, Tae In-Su, Zheng Long, and Han Yu were all in the same division as her. For all she knew, the entire group would just gang up on her.

Standing at the edge of the forest, she could already feel the predatory gazes of her opponents on her. Her notoriety was backfiring on her now. Everybody knew who she was, that she was vulnerable without her allies, and that she was one of the strongest combatants in the academy. They’d seen what happened when Hayakawa was left to her own devices, and she doubted that they’d be willing to risk letting the same happen with her.

Never mind the fact that Jia didn’t think that she’d be able to take her group by storm like Hayakawa did. Never mind the fact that Eui hadn’t been nearly so dominant in her own round. The image had been planted, and now that’s what they expected from a third-stage cultivator. In other words, that’s what they expected from her.

Grand Magus Do Hye’s voice echoed through the air, silencing the chattering crowd of students.

“Welcome to the final qualifying round, students! On the first mark, you will have ten minutes to take your position within the designated area. On the second mark, combat will begin. Once all but sixteen fighters have been eliminated, the round will end. Any further fighting after the end of the round is signalled will result in immediate disqualification. Get ready...BEGIN!”

Lee Jia infused her body with lightning ki and rushed forward at top speed. As she entered the forest, she expanded her domain to see where the other students were going. To her chagrin—if not her surprise—most of them were following right behind her.

This was going to fucking suck.